How Old Does Your Brain Feel?
How old you feel makes a difference in how you think your brain is working, especially for women. And once again, mood and self-efficacy make a difference for everyone in what they think is going on with their brains.
An interesting research study in this month’s Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences looks at what people think about their mental abilities and how old they feel. Researchers Schaefer and Schippee at Purdue University asked people how they felt about their thinking and memory as they got older with questions like “As I get older, my mental sharpness is bound to get worse.” They also asked people in their study how old they actually felt.
Then they looked at how well these persons’ actual ages and how old they actually feel predicted what they thought about how their minds would work as they get older. For women, both their actual and their perceived ages predicted what they thought about how their mental abilities would change over time. For men, neither perceived nor actual age made a difference, but their physical health did. Men who said their physical health was worse were also more pessimistic about their mental abilities.
For both groups, mood and self-efficacy were significantly related to what they thought about their mental abilities over time. This once again emphasizes how important mood and a feeling of being able to control things is for how you feel about your brain’s functioning.
The authors note that their results may have been affected by their sample size, but they raise the possibility that men and women may view their mental abilities differently as they get older. Women’s perceptions of their age seem more important for how they feel about their mental aging, while for men their physical health might be an index of how they view it. For both groups, self-efficacy and mood are important.
Reference:
Schafer MK, Shippee TP. (2010). Age identity, gender, and perceptions of decline: Does feeling older lead to pessimistic dispositions about cognitive aging? Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 65B(1), 91-96.
